


And You Were Still Hungry

by grayglube



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Altered Mental States, Blood Kink, Canon Divergent, F/F, F/M, Period Kink, Snake Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 19:21:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8459992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: He thinks while he drives. In the rearview there’s the girl whose life was stolen, she won’t ever get that back. Her eyes are tired underneath the black smear of too much make-up that looks like so much bruised skin.





	

**Author's Note:**

> There's an past Amaru/Venganza thing in this, dubcon because they are master and slave which is tricky to tag.

They return to the fertile crescent because it’s a place for heroes to go when they’ve killed their enemies and saved the world.

 

The old heroes and the slaves who made themselves lords are all dead.

 

But, they’ve won, they’ve lost, the gods show their gratitude and the world goes on.

 

His brother is dead and not dead and not around all at once. It’s hard to know what to do while he waits for the other shoe to drop.

 

Richie wonders why he’s the one who always has to wait around. He wonders if Seth ever felt the same, in some way, always the brother who gets caught, who gets punished.

 

He thinks while he drives. In the rearview there’s the girl whose life was stolen, she won’t ever get that back. Her eyes are tired underneath the black smear of too much make-up that looks like so much bruised skin.

 

There are headlights that make the bloody shine of her hair much brighter a car length behind him on the road.

 

He can see the shadow of a black hat through the windshield of the truck behind him.

 

He can hear the rev of the purloined motorcycle behind them both.

 

They’ve saved the world.

 

The Ranger drinks.

 

The Professor gets stoned.

 

The Kid falls asleep with his head on folded arms.

 

The Girl stares at him from across the room sober and awake and so real that he almost wants to cry.

* * *

 

 

Scott asks, “What now?”

 

Freddie looks like he’s been dragged behind his pick-up. “I’m going home. No more lords, no more peacekeeper.”

 

“You’re just going to run away?” There’s an accusation in Scott’s words, like he’s being left behind and abandoned, as if everyone hasn’t given enough.

 

Maybe they haven’t.

 

Richie knows that Scott was just a kid too, once.

 

Freddie barely bristles, he looks across the room at Kate, still silent, still looking out the window, looking at things the blank way she has since she came back from the dead.

 

“What more do you want from me?”

 

Richie rises, he’s stayed to his corner, sleepless and unsettled. “Let him go, Scott.”

 

And he goes.

 

The professor snorts in his sleep, Scott scowls. Kate turns her head and watches the Ranger go the same way a cat might, curled up on a window sill waiting for something to hunt down.

* * *

 

Scott asks again, two days later, “What now?” He’s shuffling through a box of hodge podge behind the counter, it’s all shiny black and bleached white, a hunter’s trophies that Burt never got to hang on his wall.

 

“I need to find my brother.” Richie doesn’t expect Scott to understand even if he might hope he does.

 

And the kid might not have hope left in him anymore. Scott says, “Seth is dead.”

 

“Yeah, it’s Xibalban hero twin bullshit, maybe, but he’s still my brother.”

 

Kate shuffles in, face washed and hair chopped to her shoulders and dyed a dark, safe shade of brown. She tells them, “He has to die before he comes back,” before she picks through the pieces of onyx and bones on the counter and starts to arrange them between her careful hands, the puzzle unpuzzled and the pieces put back together, she puts a horrific relic down and sighs, “It’s just a toy.”

 

Scott’s mouth is open, Richie feels his jaw ache around how hard he’s grinding his teeth.

 

“I’m hungry.” She tells them, she waits for an answer.

 

Scott’s brow pinches into wrinkles and Richie forces his jaw to unclench.

 

They’ve both forgotten.

 

She’s just a girl again.

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t talk for days and Scott worries.

 

Finally, after four days of silence, four days after they’ve remembered that she needs food to survive she says, “I don’t want to talk. Leave me alone.”

* * *

 

 

A month goes by.

 

Scott, perpetually angry and lost shouts at him, “She needs help!”

 

“I know.”

 

Richie knows there’s something unsettled inside of her, something that she ignores so none of them notice. He sees it. He knows.

 

He calls Freddie.

 

Dr. Block, or McGraw, or just plain Dakota comes in from parts unknown, she calls ahead and it’s as uncomfortably awkward as it should be.

 

She only walks by him, almost all bravado she got from her daddy but there’s something to be said for women like her. “Freddie asked me to, I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

 

Richie remembers what it was like talking to her before she shot him with her daddy’s gun, he’d have fucked her, still would for the simple fact that she’s the only person to con  him into a honey trap in his life.

* * *

 

“Sometimes I wonder if she’s really all gone. Sometime I tell them to do something and they do it. But, not because they want to.”

 

Dakota listens, listening is the most important part, observation is the second. “Guilt is a powerful motivator. That might be a better explanation. People try to make themselves feel less guilty by doing what they think will make up for their own shortcomings.”

 

Kate lets her shoes scuff out tracks in the gravel and dirt under her swing, the old playground creaks around them.

 

Dakota’s swing sways, twisting.

 

“They brought me back to life. Why should they feel guilty?”  Kate’s words sound like accusations, she’s angry even if her voice is quiet.

 

Dakota listen, waits.

 

Kate’s voice is watery when she speaks again, her unbrushed hair moves in the wind, “They think they’re absolved.”

* * *

 

He smokes outside, leans against a post.

 

She comes outside and sits in the old rocking chair. She holds out a hand, expectant, he gives her his cigarette and lights a new one.

 

“Are you alright?”

 

Her exhale goes still, like words stopped short in the middle of being spoken, smoke wafts out of her mouth, around her teeth and off her tongue for a moment so long he wonders if he’s in a dream, but she breathes deep through her nose and the smoke blows away.

 

He isn’t dreaming.

 

She looks up and he’s sure she’s going to speak, to answer him.

 

She puts her lit cigarette out on the back of her hand and holds it up so he can watch the skin knit back together, she leaves him outside and he knows that whatever she is now it is most definitely not ‘alright’.

 

He can feel it when she wakes up from a nightmare and he knows what the sun feels like on her skin, he knows how much it hurts to be one of the ones left waiting around, he knows she knows that he knows.

 

There’s a distance between them too wide to cross without drowning in.

* * *

 

 

She does speak, but only when necessary.

 

Scott asks for the keys to the car.

 

At first he tells him ‘no’, while going over ancient manuscripts with Tanner trying to find out exactly where his brother has gone, but Scott persists until he’s asked why.

 

“It’s for Kate.”

 

Tanner’s head jerks up, curious. “What about Katie-Cakes?”

 

She hasn’t come out of her room in two days.

 

“She just asked me to go get her stuff.”

 

“What stuff.” Richie is suspicious. It’s an innate drive.

 

Scott doesn’t answer and hackles rise in the room.

 

“Well?”

 

Scott scowls.

 

The floor creaks behind the beaded curtain of the smoke shop. Kate doesn’t come beyond it. “I got my period.”

 

Richie only looks at Scott who mumbles ‘asshole’ under his breath towards him.

 

His sister is still human. There’s a learning curve they are all failing to keep up with.

 

Tanner coughs, “Well, it looks like I came just in time to save the day,” he leaves and comes back from his sensible hybrid work week mode of transportation and offers her a box of menstrual supplies through the beaded curtain, “variety pack, for you.”

 

Scott’s mouth puckers. “That’s fucking weird.”

 

Tanner’s head pulls back on his shoulders, startled and offended, “No, it’s not.”

 

Richie can only agree, mouth pursing involuntarily, “Yes, it is.”

 

“Uh, college professor, fifty percent female class roster, of course I carry product, I’ve got it covered. Unlike you two, couple of misogynists in my midst methinks.”

 

“Even fucking weirder now,” Scott deadpans.

 

Kate’s weight shifts in the hall as she walks away. Her, “Thank you,” falls behind her as she goes.

 

Tanner smiles, “no problem.” He jabs his thumb at the curtain as if he’s been proven right.

 

He has.

 

Scott only rolls his eyes.

* * *

 

 

Dakota takes a drive out every other week and waits for her on the swings behind the gas station.

 

“I’m a Baptist so it’s not okay to do that, but…”

 

“But, you do, just like everyone else does, I’d be more worried if you’d never done it.”

 

“When I do, now, it’s not a fantasy or someone I like, it’s leftover…feelings. She was thousands of years old and I just can’t get it out of my head. So, now I try to sleep, or not. I  walk around or sit. I’m bored. Sometimes I just want to feel something.”

 

“You mean when you touch yourself?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Have you tried recently?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“And?”

 

“I just don’t feel like myself, and I know I can, do it until I…you know, but I just, I don’t want to be thinking of those things that I just, remember, the things I did when she was inside of me.”

 

“Is that because you worry she isn’t really gone?”

 

“There are things that I could think of now that I never would have thought of before. I’m not afraid of her. I just don’t want to think about those things.”

 

“What do you want to be thinking about?”

 

“The last time I got off I thought about putting my hand on someone’s face and keeping it there until their soul was gone, until they died. I want to think of normal things.”

 

“Sometimes after trauma people need to reaffirm that they are in control.”

 

“I’m me.”

 

“Do you feel in control?”

 

“It’s like my body is different now.”

 

“That might be a better place to start. Not all narcissism is bad, how you think, what you feel, your body. Start there. With just you, your body. Do you think that might help?”

 

“I’ll get back to you.”

* * *

 

 

He lets a question directed at him go unanswered, there’s something like a hand in his hand, something pulling at the back of his spine.

 

Tanner looks up, his question still unanswered. “What’s wrong”

 

“Kate.” Riche pushes back from the table. Scott does the same. “I’ll go check on her.”

 

Richie sighs. “I got it.”

 

“What?”

 

He doesn’t like to mention his connection to her but they’ve shared blood and sometimes he can still feel it. “She’ll know I’m coming, if she doesn’t want anyone there she’ll just tell me to fuck off.”

 

“I’m her brother.”

 

“You’re the last person she wants to see.”

 

“Fuck you.”

 

He doesn’t want to make the kid feel too bad, but he doesn’t know what to say to get him to back down other than some awful reminder of the past. “Shoe’s on the other foot, isn’t there still a dead girl buried in your old back yard?”

 

Tanner holds up hands, “Woah, woah, woah, Kid, relax, she’ll come around. And, you, why do you always have to go there?”

 

Richie shrugs and tries to keep his footsteps steady as he leaves the room.

 

Sometimes he feels her at night, lust and frustration, but the distress now is new and bitter. It makes him walk a little faster. She’s afraid. She’s so many things at once he wonders if she’s twisted in her sheets stuck inside her own head.

 

It’s worse than that.

* * *

 

There’s the cramping and achy fatigue that always came once a month, in the water there’s a float of red, barely there, like smoke in the bath blue water, all she ever feels is tired. So tired.

 

Her knees are islands turning pink. Her breasts are tender but she touches softly, barely exploration, but not quite benign.

 

She thinks of swimming, she thinks of being warm, she thinks of being asleep and pulls gently on a nipple.

 

A fall of hair covers the other, she startles and opens her eyes and she’s being bathed in a river of blood under a black sky. She is not herself. Something inside of her hisses and uncurls like a snake.

 

Over her shoulder there is a girl, a slave, with hot breath that’s sweet and humid.

 

Venganza is a slave but she is above the others because a Queen looks at her and wants. The girl is as young as Kate thinks she used to be, so fucking young, and her hands are sure because she is favored by a Queen.

 

Kate can feel it because Amaru has felt it. There are hand on her breasts, moving softly, meant to please her, something is moving like a snake, like rage, inside of her and she pulls on the long fall of hair until her slave falls into the river.

 

She is a Queen and inside of her there are seven snakes, along her spine and in her guts, around her heart and between her ribs by her lungs, in her throat and in her womb. Her most trusted of slaves has a tongue that tastes like the night and breasts like heavy fruit, nipples like rubies, her sex is hot and always wet and for as quiet as Venganza may be in her arms her body always thrashes.

 

There is a snake inside of her that slips out and between her legs, in the river it swims around their thighs, scales smooth and coils quick, her pretty slave sighs and opens her mouth. A queen kisses her and a snake slips inside them both and Kate can’t find a way from it.

 

In the tub water sloshes out onto the floor and her hands curl over the edge, the metal track hurting her palms and she tries to breathe. There are hands on her shoulders and she shuts her mouth on a moan, she feels things slither inside of her like memories, they are memories but they are snakes too.

 

She reaches and makes a fist in the fabric of his starched shirt, she knows him but she’s still in a river of blood and her eyes must not be her eyes because he goes pale and tight mouthed when she looks up at him.

 

Her thighs are pressed so tightly together her legs shake and she tries to not feel anything by holding her breath, it leaves her in a gasp, obscene and loud and wrong. She comes. It feels good for a long time, when she opens her eyes she’s only rage, another leftover feeling that does not belong to her.

 

She lunges, slapping against the wet floor and him, her hands are on his throat. He looks afraid. It makes her want to laugh. Everyone is afraid of her now. There’s an eye staring at her, looking into her, his hand on her head and his voice, “It’s okay.”

 

And she feels something in him, fear and the small cry of wanting something, her hands fall from his throat and he swallows, they reach between her thighs and his and he squirms, “Okay, not that okay,” his hand looks at her again, “You’re safe.”

 

She’s Kate. Just Kate.

 

When she shuts her eyes and opens them she is sitting on him, naked and the floor is wet under them and there’s a vicious cramp inside of her, she tries to get off him with some sort of ease in her limbs but her body feels useless, he shuts his eyes at least.

 

There’s a stain of red between the last two buttons of his shirt.

 

Her stare makes him startle, “What?” He looks at the blood for a long time and then up at where she’s started to cry, “Hey, it’s fine, you’re okay.” He reaches to push her hair off her face, wrap her up and try to make her feel safe, tries to tell her lies and make her feel like they are true.

 

“No, I’m not. I’m not okay. Oh my god.”

 

“Hey,” his hands are open, like a supplicant.

 

She wants to vomit, “You can’t help me.”

 

“Kate. Come on.” He folds a towel over her and she shoves him, “Get out. Stop touching me.”

* * *

 

 

Dakota comes and finds her outside. They’ve already told her that Kate’s been digging for hours. She stops on her own after sunset, her fingernails grow back after an hour.

 

Dakota keeps her tone light, offering an easy question, “Do you want to talk about what’s going on today?”

 

She goes without an answer until she presses, “Kate, did you hear me?”

 

“I don’t want to talk today.”

 

“You sure?”

 

Kate nods.

 

Dakota tries to smile but it feels more like a grimace, “Next time then.”

* * *

 

 

Kate is grateful that the Doctor leaves. She’s grateful too when Scott goes with her, to talk. Kate can imagine the conversation. Scott’s confusion and Dakota saying something like ‘grief is personal.’

 

All Kate understands is that she is not the same anymore and won’t ever be again. It hurts, but not as much as she would have thought.

* * *

 

 

“Did you eat?”

 

“Not hungry.”

 

“Tired?”

 

She shrugs.

 

“Okay.”

 

They both look down at how dirty she is, there’s blood from her torn and healed again hands down her sleeves, she’s as dusty as old bones.

 

He fills the tub for her and she stands in the doorway, waiting.

 

“What were you looking for?”

 

“You know what.”

 

His brother.

 

Steam fogs the mirror and she can’t see her reflection in it.

 

“You’re sad.” When she says it her tone makes it sound like an accusation, she doesn’t mean it to, he turns his head but doesn’t look at her, he sits on the closed toilet lid and holds a hand under the water. Eventually, he shuts it off.

 

“I’m sad too.” She admits it. He looks up.

* * *

 

Her kiss is dry and gentle until her lips part. The humidity of her mouth moves into his, he pulls away from it and she doesn’t follow.

 

Her jeans go first then her underwear are kicked off her ankles, there’s a kotex blotted bright red leering at him a few feet away, his fangs drop and he keeps his lips shut around them, they hurt like impacted wisdom teeth.

 

The scent of her is trapped with them inside the steam and her hand is under her shirt, fingers like phantoms on her breast.

 

A sigh falls out of her open mouth and he’s gone breathless.

 

He worries his fangs with his tongue while she’s looking down at him. He snuffles like an animal because if he opens his mouth he’ll taste the iron of her in the steam. He lets his head hang and reaches to put a hip in each hand.

 

And, at first, he does push her, but only at first, away from him. She goes with a small bare step back. Before his hands have left her skin, she asks him if trying to say no makes him feel less guilty.

 

It doesn’t.

 

He stands to back her into the wall until her spine straightens. She’s thinking so many things it’s hard to hear them all but when he pulls her hips forward and then pushes them back it feels like he’s trying to bring her mind back to what’s between them.

 

She looks up at his face, sneering, tells him she was going to save herself for someone who loved her but she’ll settle for someone who wanted to save her. His gums are still tender when she touches at his jaw.

 

It’s easy to get on his knees with apologies, mouth open and tongue slicking over her. She bleeds weakly all over his tongue, salt and girl-woman. Her ribs flare out before her navel collapses with her shaky exhale. Her eyes are closed and her throat works on a swallow, she makes a sound like she’s about to cry.

 

He hunches his shoulders and gets between her legs, gets them open wide but it’s her that puts a knee over his shoulder. Desert grit that shakes loose from her ankle’s shaky rhythm once he starts, in earnest, to lick into her.

 

She goes up on her toes while her fingers stroke his nape and his chin drips red.  Her eyes open on the ceiling, mouth making new sounds around half-choked prayers. He moves his mouth away to put fingers inside of her to make her hips dance in small jerks between his open mouth and the wall, the way she says ‘god,’ is almost plaintive.

 

She’s wet in a way that blood isn’t, slick all around his fingers. She’s more than just blood and hate, she’s lust and giving-up. The arch of her foot cups his shoulder; he puts a hand under her raised thigh and keeps her knees open like a wingspan, sucking his fingers clean and giving her his tongue again until she’s babbling.

 

A thumb traces the back of his ear and a fan of four fingers makes a mess of his hair. The hand on her breast moves and strokes her sternum, her throat’s thrown back like it’s waiting for teeth to be put to it.

 

A thought passes from her mind to his, she wants to be opened up around his cock, she wants to be filled up full of someone who is  _ real _ . She wants to rest and she wants so much to feel something that doesn’t belong to anyone else.

 

Every night she gets fucked but it’s a dream of someone, somewhere, something else. In her dreams she is not herself. He doesn’t need to say anything for her to hear him. He’ll do whatever she wants. If she wants him to. And, he’s sad about it all too.

 

She doesn’t answer with words, she just tilts herself closer to his mouth, messy and hungry.

 

Her blood coating the back of his throat when he swallows and the taste of her sex on the tip of his tongue make his eyes yellow and his skin scale. She looks down at him over her nose and her open mouth and startles, he can hear her think that he looks like her slave.

 

When he gives her an orgasm there’s enough guilt that comes with it that it only lasts longer. Shame is a rough ache with a sharp edge.

 

When she’s standing on her own, shaky knees and a hand between her thighs like she’s keeping him away from something he might steal he tells her, “If I was someone’s slave you’d be my first choice.”

 

She raises her arms so he can finish undressing her, palm bloody and knees still shaking.

 

She’s chin deep in her bath when she finally replies. “I’m sorry.”

 

He lights a cigarette and tries not to chuckle, she’s being sincere, he knows he should try to do the same. “Because it gets you hot? That’s not Amaru, that’s everyone Sister Christian.”

 

“I wasn’t ready to die.”

 

“You aren’t dead,” he tells her. It isn’t a lie but even if she still bleeds like any other living girl, she’s not the same.

 

“And I was just so afraid, I should have been happy, like going home. I keep waiting to be punished for it. I just,” she stops, her mumbled words sinking into the water. She takes a breath, “I just didn’t want to die.”

 

“That’s everyone, too.” He takes another drag and licks the back of his teeth.

 

“I keep wanting to know these things about people and sometimes I wonder if it matters if I should know them before I do something. But, then, I know it doesn’t.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I should have asked you if you were okay, but, I don’t really care. I just wanted you to make me feel good. Because you ruined my life and you still need to pay for that.”

 

“I’m sorry.” He means it, his brother meant it.

 

She reaches from the tub with a washcloth, wipes away the sin from his mouth, the stain of her not-quite human body, the truth of what they are now.

 

His tongue follows her swipes. His starched collar goes moist, a shade that’s almost pink left behind.

 

“I don’t forgive you either.”


End file.
